Mastering of basic skills is a prerequisite to thrive in life, to find fulfilling jobs and to become engaged citizens. In 2018, the EU did not achieve its target to reduce the share of 15-year-olds achieving low levels of attainment in reading, maths and science to less than 15% by 2020. Even though students’ performance in the EU measured by PISA mostly deteriorated over the last decade, some EU countries have been able to beat the overall trend and improve their performance. Many of them are known to have implemented structural education reforms such as increasing school autonomy, tackling inequalities from early years and strengthening teacher training systems. It is therefore, of outmost importance, to understand how certain reforms may have contributed to improving academic success of students in specific countries and identify patterns for successful measures for achieving quality and inclusiveness of the EU education systems - the two of the six dimensions of the European Education Area vision.
Against this background, PPMI in collaboration with the University of Liege (Research Unit on Evaluation and Quality of Education EQUALE), will aim to provide the European Commission with in-depth analysis of the factors behind the improvement of PISA results in selected EU countries, which show interesting trends in student achievement, by looking at student, school, and system factors, considering regional and national contexts.
